But maybe instead we should tip large. And give A’s. Believe reasons for missing a deadline. Refuse to get to know students through the window of a rubric. We are not dealing with students, but people with dreams, people who will fail and people who will succeed, people who may end up alone and people whose high point of the day may be a conversation with us. Being kind may seem counterintuitive to the academic ethos—especially when being kind can sometimes mean being wrong—but we owe it to ourselves to think outside our setting, to see past the artificial boundaries of generation, expertise, and authority. And while we’re at it: race, gender, sexuality, religion.

“In our modern lifestyle we are not runners anymore. So we are basically disconnected from what we previously had to do. Most of us are out of shape and we don’t have to run for our hamburger or our dinner. But deep down we are still all runners and so our minds, as much as our muscles are part of this running phenotype.”